I Once Cried During Lord I Lift Your Name on High…
“God comes to us disguised as our life” as Paul D’Arcy states so poetically. We wish it were a little more dramatic than that. As a young Christian, I mostly thought that the experience of God happened in the emotional realm. It can, and it does, but I mistakenly thought that this was the whole of how God came to me. I would long for emotional highs of retreat, conference, missions, and worship experiences. This meant that God was divorced from the rest of my life: the boring aspects of going to work, doing schoolwork, relating to irritating people. I think that this is a natural beginning season with God where we find God only in the positive and easy places to see Him, mostly in emotional experiences.
But God refuses to leave us in this shallow puddle of faith and invites us into the deeper waters of faith. He shows us this by the life of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is the even we celebrate every December 25th, when God put on flesh and came as a baby in the manger. Yet I did not realize the extent of this celebration and it’s meaning as a young Christian, and I am still plumbing the depths today.
The Incarnation changed everything. God put flesh on and moved into our neighborhood, lived our experiences, overcame our temptations, died our death, and was raised in Resurrection into a glorified body. Resurrection is not to merely come back from the dead, but to come back transformed. Jesus was not like who he was before he died. His faithfulness to death transformed him. So the Father glorified Jesus, and we share in that glorification.
God did some important things with the incarnation. One, God illustrated a practice of our faith that is very applicable to our daily lives. The incarnation shows us that our faith and our life are to be married together and not seen as separate entities. We are living in a new creation within the old creation as its ambassadors. We are bringing heaven to earth with the way we practice our faith.
Eternal life is living fully into this new creation with all its joys and hardships.
It is the quality of life within this new creation. A way of living with God in the present that is so rich that it transcends death, transcends pain, transcends sorrow, embracing the reality of these fully, yet realizing that it is not the Great Reality, because a new Reality overrides this one, and will one day win.
We live in this new creation incarnationally, just as Christ did. Christ was a full citizen of the new creation, and lived its rules in the present old creation, initiating it into existence and passing the torch of this ambassadorship to the church, who he empowered with His Spirit, the same Spirit that raised Him from the dead.
So now all of life can come under the influence of this new creation, this rule and reign of God. We are not just in a waiting mode for a spiritual heaven dedicated to a moralistic faith in the meantime so we don’t “lose” our status with God. We are full citizens of God’s kingdom, the new creation, and its influence permeates all of life.
A Jesuit priest’s presentation at a retreat helped me realize the implications of the incarnation. He divided up the world into four categories that we interact with relationship. We have relationship with Self, Others, Communities, and Creation. Every relationship we have can be summed up into one of these four categories. The quality of life that we experience within these categories is eternal life, because we are still experiencing God incarnationally through our life. I came up with this illustration based on his ideas.
As we stated earlier, God comes to us disguised as our life. The quality of life in these categories will be distorted by sin, ours and others against us. This is the concept of Shalom in our earlier post on Spiritual Formation IS Salvation. We will never fully realize a sinless existence while the old creation still remains. But the theology of eternal life says that we can get a foretaste of heaven in the present through the Holy Spirit. The more we foster this new creation life over the old creation life determines the quality of eternal life.
Liminal Leadership 